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Honest question: are spam calls common in the US? I don't remember when / if I got any in Spain, Netherlands or UK (places I've lived and had cellphones for a p

by saghul 10y ago

Honest question: are spam calls common in the US? I don't remember when / if I got any in Spain, Netherlands or UK (places I've lived and had cellphones for a prolonged time), I do remember, however, that when I managed to score a US number with Google Voice I'd regularly get weird spammy voicemails. If that is the case, I wonder why that is!

bbrks 10y ago
Spam calls are a nuisance in the UK too. Especially on landlines. If you threaten them with reporting to the TPS (Telephone preference service) and they're not just a robot, they sometimes stop bothering you.
gadders 10y ago
I get PPI and ambulance chasing car insurance calls all the time in the UK.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  I've had the same UK mobile number for... 16 years, and I get perhaps one spam call per year. As far as I know, numbers aren't recycled, so maybe the number is in such an old range that spammers don't bother calling it. I'm careful about who I give the number to, but I do share it.
  - gadders 10y ago
    I've had mine 20 years.I probably get 1-2 calls a month, some of which I dodge using True Caller.
lorenzhs 10y ago
Never got a single spam call or text in Germany either. I did get a bunch of credit card phishing texts while visiting the US (on a US SIM) and one or two calls from strange numbers that I didn't answer. No problems with a UK mobile number while I lived there. Seems like mostly landlines are affected there?
yandie 10y ago
I got scam phone calls very often in the UK here, mostly about car accidents. I don't even drive, let alone own a car!
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>Honest question: are spam calls common in the US? I'm not sure what happened, but lately they've been rare (I suspect there's a lot of pressure on voip providers to up their game and stop selling to scammers), but in 2015 I had one or two per day, easy. These people often faked caller-id and had different numbers each time. It was difficult to block, so I just stopped answering calls I didn't recognize. Worse, if you answered and treated them civilly like "No thank you I'm not interested in this please remove my number," they just hang up on you and then you get a new call from a different agent an hour later reading the exact same script. The callers were obviously Indian call centers using scratchy sounding voip connections usually pretending to be your insurance company and asking for personal information or trying to sell you no-name car insurance.
saghul 10y ago
Thanks everyone for sharing your experiences! I used to joke this kind of spam no longer existed, now I know. As Murphy's law would have had it, got my first spam SMS after posting this. THEY ARE WATCHING US.

by saghul 10y ago

bbrks 10y ago

Spam calls are a nuisance in the UK too. Especially on landlines. If you threaten them with reporting to the TPS (Telephone preference service) and they're not just a robot, they sometimes stop bothering you.

gadders 10y ago

I get PPI and ambulance chasing car insurance calls all the time in the UK.

Symbiote 10y ago
I've had the same UK mobile number for... 16 years, and I get perhaps one spam call per year. As far as I know, numbers aren't recycled, so maybe the number is in such an old range that spammers don't bother calling it. I'm careful about who I give the number to, but I do share it.
- gadders 10y ago
  I've had mine 20 years.I probably get 1-2 calls a month, some of which I dodge using True Caller.

lorenzhs 10y ago

Never got a single spam call or text in Germany either. I did get a bunch of credit card phishing texts while visiting the US (on a US SIM) and one or two calls from strange numbers that I didn't answer. No problems with a UK mobile number while I lived there. Seems like mostly landlines are affected there?

yandie 10y ago

I got scam phone calls very often in the UK here, mostly about car accidents. I don't even drive, let alone own a car!

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

>Honest question: are spam calls common in the US? I'm not sure what happened, but lately they've been rare (I suspect there's a lot of pressure on voip providers to up their game and stop selling to scammers), but in 2015 I had one or two per day, easy. These people often faked caller-id and had different numbers each time. It was difficult to block, so I just stopped answering calls I didn't recognize. Worse, if you answered and treated them civilly like "No thank you I'm not interested in this please remove my number," they just hang up on you and then you get a new call from a different agent an hour later reading the exact same script. The callers were obviously Indian call centers using scratchy sounding voip connections usually pretending to be your insurance company and asking for personal information or trying to sell you no-name car insurance.

saghul 10y ago

Thanks everyone for sharing your experiences! I used to joke this kind of spam no longer existed, now I know. As Murphy's law would have had it, got my first spam SMS after posting this. THEY ARE WATCHING US.